Saboteur

Of course it didn’t work out like that – the nice ‘family day out’ I had envisaged this morning. One day off together in god knows how long, and the pressure was too much, and instead of playing happy families I just exploded. It’s always something else when you go in front of the kids. The awareness that you are causing lasting psychological damage to juvenile synapses adds fuel to an already potent chamber of pressure, pressure, pressure.

The lack of a car meant a day out of the capital was out of the question, so our planned trip to Chessington, despite the gorgeous, just washed freshness of the late October day , didn’t happen. We decided on the Cutty Sark, with a trip over the river on the cable cars. Or at least I thought we did. I was too busy cleaning, blogging and herding children through the holiday battlegrounds of breakfast, dressing, turning off the telly this morning to pay much attention. When Tom mentioned the O2 and cinema, in the sameish vicinity, and as a coda to our conversation about where we would go, I just nodded barely listening.

On the bus, having dealt with a tantrum over a biscuit, and washed dog piss off the floor only to have it padded back in after a walk, I noticed my blog had errors but WordPress wasn’t playing and trying to correct typos on a 5 inch screen when WordPress for mobile is about as effective as tying your shoelace with boxing gloves, meant that my OCD was fighting against travel sickness as I attempted to make amends on the hoof.

It fucked up. Tom, quiet, lispy, patient, infuriating, made a helpful remark that made me want to tear his eyes out, only I was wearing mental boxing gloves, so instead I gave myself a proverbial black eye and stormed of the bus. I threw my phone  – the source of so much stress, anxiety and distraction, and it smashed in a million little pieces. Thus relieved, I attempted to reboard the bus, now stopped at a red light. The driver ignored my knocks until I shouted, frantic and tears, “my kids are on the bus” whereupon he opened the doors and proceeded, loudly to chastise me in the strongest, Childline dissembling terms for leaving my kids on the bus. I ignored him. Tom was with them. By now, the bus audience was sitting firmly in Tom’s camp.

I showed Tom my phone and he tutted and told me it would cost £80.00 worth of insurance excess. I went quiet. Then swore By then I was in tears, and being silently booed by a jeering crowd of judgemental bus wankers.

Off the bus at Westferry, I was in floods, and to make everything worse, rather than being allowed to be alone with my temper,  kitteney Ava was telling me “not to worry about your phone Mama Cat, it will be ok,” and Jonah was telling me he was hungry. He’d already had a bag of Squares and the aforementioned biscuit, an Oreo-alike from Lidl that Tom had bought (“they’re as addictive as Crack, y’know”) which hadn’t been the right flavour. I patted Ava’s hand and told him baldly to stop being a pig. Jonah, never a fan of full on female hysteria, despite being prone to the ‘odd’ seven year old hissy fit himself, glowered back at me, feeling the full force of my ire as Ava tried to hug me. Good parenting in motion. Passers by took a wide berth as they tried to pass what was clearly a red faced, tear stained madwoman holding court in the middle of the narrow pavement.

I looked for nicotine, while Tom passified me enough to get on the DLR. I sucked deeply on his e-lite.

I don’t like public transport at the best of times, but sniffling, and redfaced, it was unbearable. I am also not a big fan of heights, and as we boarded the locked-in cabin full of strangers which would fly 284 feet above the Thames, I felt something akin to claustrophobia and tried to look impassive as the cable car full of  tourists took snaps past my shamefaced glare. Half way across the Thames, I felt my breasts ping in a timely reminder. Half way. The upward trajectory towards week four water weight, sore tits, angry pelvis and irrationality begins again for another month.

When we got off at the O2, it dawned on me, my error. “I thought we were going to the Cutty Sark,” I hissed.

“No , we said the O2 remember? We talked about the cinema? No?”

“No.”

The beautiful day had grown snarly, the wind getting up. Jonah, in shorts, complained about the cold. I huffed. I hate shopping centres. And chain restaurants. And the O2, or the “Millenium Dome” as people of my generation still find themselves calling it, is like a massive shopping centre of chain restaurants in a big round warehouse.

I was not happy. I consented to eat at Pizza Express, still glowering. My salad was too cold, too… salady. The poor not-with-English-as-a-first-language waitress, who tried her best to cheer me up despite my scowl, fluffed my order of lime and soda, and I pedantically corrected her. The kids grew clamourous over sugary ice cream toppings. I watched fat people eat pizza and felt disgusted. The world felt all wrong, and the flashes behind my eyes of jumping in front of the DLR grew a bit noisier against the backdrop of tinny restaurant  hip hop and the next door child’s computer console, who I sulkily told, to the chagrin of his parents,  to turn it down.

Tom’s patience grew huffy.

I hadn’t had a cigarette in three days. I felt like a heroin addict, as I stalked out of the restaurant, trapped in the giant warehousey tourist trap chain restaurant sanitised circle of hell that is the O2, where nicotine doesn’t exist and smokers are relegated to the great windy outdoors where they belong. The claustrophobia reached itS zenith as I pushed past contented merrymakers to get to a purveyor of nicotine.

They are never real, these flashes. They just pop up in my mind, never to be acted upon, but their presence is a good indicator of how wretched I am at any one time. An annoying reminder of my own lack of empathy and JUST HOW MUCH I HATE MYSELF in the given moment.

Tom and the kids caught up with me and we began the five part journey home. When we got there, I promptly fell asleep on the sofa, irritatedly swatting at the kids and Tom who were whispering like dripping taps as they tried to carve pumpkins. I’ve barely spoken to them for the rest of the day. I am in a funk. My holiday, such as it was –  having been chopped and changed needlessly by management until I didn’t know where I stood –  lies in shreds and I am in gentle, slothful despair.